Club3D Radeon HD 7970 royalAce Review

Introduction:

AMD launched the Radeon HD 7970 GHz edition, their current flagship single GPU, in mid of 2012; exactly 6 months after the launch of the Radeon HD 7970. They said it to be a celebration gift of the HD 7970’s half-year birthday but it was clearly an answer to NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 680. With the new card, AMD did not change anything in terms of hardware. The change was in card’s clocks and some BIOS features. The original HD 7970 comes with 925 MHz core clock while the GHz edition has a full 1 GHz clock on the core. Memory clock is also bumped from 5.5 GHz to 6 GHz. Moreover, AMD introduced their PowerTune Boost feature with the HD 7970 GHz. Once again, it is their answer to NVIDIA’s GPU Boost feature. It is a combination of BIOS and Catalyst driver changes that allows the software to overclock the GPU when conditions permit, and can be done without any hardware changes.

Club3D has prepared a custom graphics card based on Radeon HD 7970 GHz edition. Technically, it’s a reference card with higher clocks and custom cooler. It even has the reference PCB design. Club3D calls in Radeon HD 7970 royalAce edition. It has a base clock of 1050 MHz (50 MHz higher than the reference card) which goes up to 1100 MHz with the help of the new PowerTune Boost technology. However, memory clock is same 6 GHz as the reference HD 7970 GHz edition. The cooler of HD 7970 royalAce is company’s exclusive design. It has two 92mm fans with three heatpipes and two decks of aluminum fins. This custom graphics card by Club3D is not available at any major US retailer; however it is readily available in European region for £370 (around $560). This puts it above most of the Radeon HD 7970 graphics cards in terms of price.